September 2007

So, by actually taking the time to learn more about my own personality, it has lead me to a better understanding of my strengths and weaknesses and what it takes to make me happy professionally.

When trying to find one’s place in the world, or just trying to find out if you’re moving along the right career path, it’s important to truly understand yourself and the unique personality traits you possess (e.g., things which will impact your likeliness to succeed or fail at various chosen careers).

It’s equally important to understand what is really important to you as well. When you are accurately armed with an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, and an awareness of what you truly value, you are in an excellent position to pick a good career (one which you will actually find rewarding).

So, it appears that I’m an ENTJ… hmm, who would have thunk it.

The “ENTJ” personality type is one of the sixteen personality types that can be indicated from the Myers-Briggs Type Indictor (MBTI) a well-known system based on Carl Gustav Jung’s (a Swiss psychiatrist) work in the field of analytical psychology.

The following quote seems to be an accurate portrait, “ENTJs have a natural tendency to marshall and direct. This may be expressed with the charm and finesse of a world leader or with the insensitivity of a cult leader. The ENTJ requires little encouragement to make a plan.” – Joe Butt, University of Virginia

ENTJs are especially well-suited to be leaders and organization builders. They have the ability to clearly identify problems and find innovative solutions for the short and long-term well-being of an organization. But, the downside to this set of traits is that with having this strong desire to lead, they’re not likely to be happy as followers or minions. ENTJs like to be in charge, and actually need to be in charge to take advantage of their unique blend of capabilities and gifts.

The following is a list of professions built on the impressions of careers which would be especially suitable for this personality type:

Well, we want to offer the best possible experience to all of this years ZendCon ‘07 attendees – so, in that vein we are offering the ability to see sessions from remote speaker such as Maggie Nelson – she will be speaking at the PHP Unconference ‘07 (Marco Tabini Style Presentation a.k.a. iChat)

Well, it started off a little weird – Paul Reinheimer was a total tard to me (just kidding man – glad we worked through that stuff). Note: Should totally learn to speak Canadian one of these days… maybe Sean Coates offers a small course to those south of the Canucks’ border.

Chris Shiflett’s keynote, “PHP 4 is dead! Migrate your code” was short but, sweet – although I think Shiflett’s Mom was a bit confused by it. [ But, I am sure she was proud of her little baby. ] But, to be totally honest the nightmare that night wasn’t cool – the image of Wez Furlong as a zombie was hard to shake and that crazy White Russian with the Edward scissor hand action was a bit hard to handle as well.

Terry Chay did such a wonderful job with his, “Finding Art in the Software Architecture” talk it really isn’t funny – he so reminds me of a young Guy Kawasaki (no offense Guy…). I really felt that it would have been better suited as a keynote. It didn’t really have much technical content unless you count the fact that he provided a description of viral growth using the exponential function — (e.g., exponential growth…). Not bad for a south bay kid with a masters degree in something like Theoretical Particle Physics from University of Illinois.

LHB got to have a little East Coast festive occasion at a nice little spot conveniently located in mid-town Atlanta called Sutra Lounge — we now have an additional sixteen or so Andrei Zmievski and random unicode fan photos to post (stay tuned).

In closing, the final keynote was a cool concept – nicely executed – hope Paul/Sean still have a job… when they get home.

All I can say is good work to the entire php | architect crew… it was a good educational event for all in attendance. Looking forward to their spring conference – if you missed this one you totally owe it to yourself to attend their spring conference in Chicago.